>hurr durr I pretended to be retarded give me (You)s
go away

>>12270403
The Gameboy had an 8-bit Zilog Z80 CPU.

SNES uses a 16-bit Ricoh 5A22 CPU several coprocessors with DMA.

>>12270403
What >>12270475 said, also the fact that the cpu needed to be 6502 compatible for the (planned) famicom reverse compatibility limited the hardware designer's options.

>>12270475
Actually I was wrong here.
The gameboy featured a custom SoC manufactured by Sharp. It incorporates all of the coprocessors into a single chip. Something the SNES didn’t have since it used separate (but more powerful) chips

>The SM83 core was part of a larger System on a Chip (SoC) manufactured by Sharp, which also integrated the Picture Processing Unit (PPU), Audio Processing Unit (APU), and memory control logic into a single package.

>>12270475
Wasn't the SNES CPU 8 bit internally with a 16 bit bus or something weird? Thus making the Genesis the only true 16 bit system.

>>12270514
genesis cpu is 32-bit

>>12270483
Except they had to include the coprocessors in the cartridges just like the SNES. That's how bad the hardware was. Imagine that, you have to buy a new processor included in the game to play the game.

>>12270524
>just like the SNES.
*just like the NES

>>12270526
NES cartridges didn't have support for expansion chips, the most they could do to augment the limitations of the NES was via bankswitching

>>12270514
No, the SNES is a 16-bit CPU

>>12270516

Genesis used a Motorola 68k which was an 16/32-bit CPU. Genesis used it in 16-bit mode

>>12270514
Other way around. A 16-bit CPU with 16-bit instructions kneecapped by data taking the short bus if you will.

>>12270475
>>12270403
>The Gameboy had an 8-bit Zilog Z80 CPU.
It wasn't even a full Z80. Apart from the missing instructions and addressing modes, the biggest problem was that everything was based on 4-cycle timing. So even the tiniest NOP took 4 cycles. The SNES on the other hand was based on 2 cycles. While you can't exactly compare 4.2MHZ/4 and 2.68/2 due to variability with the instruction cycle counts, it's a nice rule of thumb to explain why the MHz isn't the whole story.
It's also why the SNES managed to hold on compared to the megadrive's 7MHz 68k. The 68k on a 16bit bus had so many cycle penalties that when you're just doing byte and double-byte memory copies (which you do a fuckload of in 2D consoles) the SNES had the advantage. But then if you were doing any math or any kind of processing the 68k pissed all over the 65816 so much it wasn't even funny.

>>12270528
>NES cartridges didn't have support for expansion chips
You are so retarded, even when you're on the internet you couldn't take the time to use a search engine before spewing your wrong and garbage opinion.

>>12270680
then can you explain to me why only the famicom had games with expansion audio

>>12270687
did u kno that super mario 2 for the nes was originally dorky dorky picnic for a completely different rare japenese system called the famicom??????

>>12270679
But that puts the Gameboy at around 2MHZ compared to the SNES's still 2.68MHz. So why was the SNES so damn slow?

the snezz would melt and start a house fire if it tried to run something like Alien Soldier.

>>12270707
slow rom access. that's all.
the snes cpu is 3.58 mhz but it's downclocked when accessing slower memory.
rom memory was expensive, so nintendo offered slower variants for cheapskate devs (almost all of them) at the cost of performance in the form of lower cpu clock speed.

>>12270707
>But that puts the Gameboy at around 2MHZ
?
If the minimum cycle was 4, then that's effectively 4.2/4 = 1.05 million instructions per second.
SNES would be 2.68/2 = 1.34 million instructions per second.
I don't know where you get 2 from.
And like I said, that's just the minimum, but mostly the instructions scale, so what took 3-4 cycles on the SNES was 8 on the gameboy.
The "why" is hard to pin down. "Bad code" is pretty much going to be the answer. Not that GB programmers were doing any better, but it comes down to simpler code. For instance Link's Awakening doesn't have 8-way scrolling. The gameplay loop just handles the onscreen sprites and logic, when you touch the edge of the screen the gameplay freezes and the CPU just does the scrolling. The SNES was doing 8-way scrolling while the game logic was being run. You could have more sprites onscreen on the snes, 128 vs. 40 on the GB so the temptation to overcook it was always there. Multiple background layers as well, more data to process. Basically fully loading the SNES hardware put more demands on the CPU than the GB did, but the CPU wasn't quite scaled appropriately.
But to repeat myself of course the real answer is going to be "bad code." Just like how today game devs use their 9950X3D+5090 machines to test their UE5 slop and hardly pay any care to optimising when it runs fine on their supercomputers, 90s devs weren't any better. The dev hardware gave them the option to run at 3.58MHz which was a nice boost over LoROM and you bet they used it. "Just for debugging" of course. And then gave it a little tweak 2 weeks before release for the worst problems now it was running at 2.68Mhz.

>>12270738
Yeah I was basically cutting the Gameboy speed in half to bring it to the equivalent of 2 cycles/set like the SNES for comparison's sake. Even then it's still so slow.

>>12270559
> Genesis used it in 16-bit mode
The 68k does not have a mode.
It has instructions which can operate on 8 16 or 32 bits.
32bit instructions take more clock cycles and as such are not just used for no reason, but genesis games still make use of 32bit math when appropriate, such as for 16.16 fixed point math.

>>12270475
In English, Doc!

mhz doesn't reallly matter in older consoles because it spends 90% idling waiting for other hardware or screen redraw

This is boring, just do the classic md vs snes shitstorm
https://youtu.be/6IyYNobEiqU?si=Rqdh-Myk5ZB_pXAG

>>12270878
SNES is painful to watch.

>>12270880
EA was hit or miss with the snes, some ran ok others ran like shit, pretty much everyone made smoother soccer games than the Fifa series on the snes.

>>12270514
You're thinking of the PC Engine

>>12270987
That one was an overclocked NES processor but 2 16 bit graphics processors.